


On Borderland We Run

by Insignem



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Dogs, M/M, Memory Loss, PTSD, Post-Winter Soldier, Recovery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-25
Updated: 2014-07-25
Packaged: 2018-02-10 10:25:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2021469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Insignem/pseuds/Insignem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As his memories and personhood return, Bucky finds himself relying on his new shadow to figure out who to trust.</p><p> <br/>In other words, Bucky and a dog find each other and start the long road to recovery (and to Steve) together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On Borderland We Run

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from U2's ["A Sort of Homecoming"](http://youtu.be/NnEmiTPiP8I) which is one of my favorite songs, and fits my vision of Bucky's Post-Winter Soldier mindset quite well.
> 
> Basically I really love dogs (I work at a kennel and spend my days surrounded by them) but beyond that, they often make a huge difference in the lives of soldiers suffering from PTSD (even as companions, with no specific training as therapy dogs). Seemed like a dog might be exactly what Bucky needs, as he tries to become a person again.

He cuts his hair.

He tells himself it's practical; that hair falling down across his face and in his eyes is the last thing he needs. No matter that it's been long for a while now, or that it has never bothered him before.

He tells himself that it's not because the photographs of Bucky Barnes in the museum show a man with short hair. A man with short hair, and his own face.

~-~

The empty warehouse he's squatting in has a tiny bathroom. The plumbing doesn't work, but there's a dingy mirror and enough light streaking in through the window that he can see his reflection staring back at him. Dirty brown hair litters the ground at his feet. In the mirror, Bucky Barnes meets his hollow gaze.

Bucky Barnes was smart, athletic, a war hero, and Steve Rogers' best friend. Or so the Smithsonian told him. But him? He is not any of those things. He is a killer, a scarred shell wrapped around a person that no longer exists. They've wiped him clean enough times to be sure of that, turned him more weapon than human. But things get through the cracks – and every time the person he was starts to come back, they wipe him clean once again. 

He thinks maybe that person is still there, buried deep. The longer it's been since they've put him under, the more that person's memories start to emerge.

And now his handlers are gone. He is no longer their Asset. The Winter Solider is without a mission.

He doesn't know where that leaves him.

He doesn't know what to do.

But Bucky Barnes is staring back at him, and it feels like maybe this could be a starting point.

~-~

Pulling the man out of the water was an autonomous decision. To the best that his fragmented memory will allow him to recall, it is the first autonomous decision he has made in a very, very long time. It should be momentous. 

He'd known that he'd been wiped, and that this man was his new target. And though he didn't even know what his last mission had been, fighting Captain America on the helicarrier carried too much familiarity - his brain was fighting the memory wipe sooner than ever. It was the man from the bridge. _I knew him_. Still, his programming had held strong even as the man's words had pummeled him as surely as his fists: “You’ve known me your whole life... Your name is James Buchanan Barnes... You’re my friend.”

Each utterance had been a knife going into his skull, and he'd focused the pain into rage, onto completing the mission.

But the last stab hit the barrier and cracked it open. “I'm with you til the end of the line,” the man had said. And suddenly he wasn't just his target. _I knew him_.

Everything inside him had shattered into a billion chaotic, conflicting pieces, and he'd been frozen, unable to act. But they'd plunged down towards the water below, and for a split second, the burning metal surrounding him was gone, and he was falling through icy wind instead, watching as a familiar face grew smaller and smaller in the distance.

Hitting the water had been like waking up. The mission had washed away, and instead of finishing the job, he'd located the man who'd been his target and dragged him to the river bank.

It was his first autonomous decision. But it hadn't felt momentous. It had just felt right.

~-~ 

He lies rolled up in his jacket on the hard warehouse floor, his neck cold in its new bareness. He welcomes the discomfort. It's strange, to be glad to feel misfortune, but for too long he had felt nothing. It had been easy to ignore his body's needs, before, when they kept him sedated more often than not, or focused his brain on the vital need to complete a mission and nothing else. Discomfort means, at least, that he is human and not a machine. He is susceptible to hunger and cold, to the need for rest, and it is strange, but he is glad for it.

It's raining, a constant thrum against the roof far above his head. His thoughts return, as they always do now, to the man who had been his mission. The man he knew. The only connection back to a life so long buried he isn't sure he can ever retrieve it.

The Smithsonian had given him names. Bucky Barnes and his friend, Steve Rogers. Captain America. He doesn't know these people. But he'd like to, he thinks. He just doesn't know how.

There's a low thump from outside, and he's instantly on alert. He palms a knife, gripping it tightly, as he moves without a sound towards the entrance. If it's trouble, he doesn't want it. He's been squatting here for a few nights and he'd rather not have to find a new place.

As he nears the door, he hears a shuffling noise, and then a quick bark. Claws skitter against the metal door. Just a dog, then. He sighs, relaxing his stance but keeping his grip on the knife as he turns back towards his sleeping corner. 

Another bark.

Fine, then. If the dog's going to keep barking until he lets it in, he might as well. He can defend himself if necessary.

The bark turns into a whine and a memory bites through him; a mark's barking dog silenced with a quick slice across the throat. Bile rises in his throat, unexpectedly, and he braces himself against the wall as his stomach lurches. The memories aren't new – specifics of his kills come back to him all the time – but the remorse is. When his target – Steve Rogers, he reminds himself. Captain America, Bucky Barnes' best friend – had broken through to him on the helicarrier, it was as though he'd cracked open a fissure in his brain. Things keep trickling through – emotions, flashes of remembrance, things that remind him for the first time an a very long time that he is human. A person.

He wants to be a person again. A person would feel remorse at killing a dog that wasn't even attacking. A person wouldn't think twice about letting a stray in for shelter from the rain. Instinct still rules strong though - it always has for him. So he keeps the knife tight in his metal hand, and opens the door with the one that is still bone and flesh.

The dog pushes past him into the dry building before he can open the door more than a crack, and he shuts it again quickly. It's dark, but he has no trouble seeing in low light. Even so, the dog blends almost frighteningly well into the shadows. He takes a cautious step closer, maintaining some distance, then crouches to eye level. The dog is fairly large, mostly black. Its ears are large and pointed, pricked towards him, and he can make out pale eyes and teeth glistening from a long, narrow snout.

He creeps closer, keeping himself small, his movements slow and careful. It's enough like stalking prey that he shudders, fighting back the muscle memory that tries to take over. The knife is still in his hand, and maybe it's not a good idea, but he sheaths it. He's close enough now that a quick glance tells him the dog is female. She's still watching him come closer, but she hasn't moved, until suddenly her whole body shakes and water sprays everywhere, droplets hitting his face. He freezes for a beat, everything tensing up, but he wills himself to relax as the dog closes the last distance, sniffing at him. He can feel the air move as her wagging tail beats at it, and then before he has a chance to register her teeth as a threat, she licks at his face. A strange feeling bubbles up in his chest and he doesn't know what it is until an odd sound bursts out of him, a sensation so foreign that he fears, just for a second, that his lungs are failing. But that's not right. He's laughing, not dying.

There's a dog wagging her tail and kissing his face, and that a living being could react this way to him is at once an incredible lightness and a heavy, heavy weight. Before he has any idea what's happening, the laughs change, turn to sobs, and the sensation is no less strange but it's devastating now, like grief is a physical force trying to push his insides out of his body. It's too much, too much emotion and too much pain after being numb for so long, but the dog is licking the tears off his cheeks and she lets him bury his shaking hand in her thick, damp fur, and cry. 

~-~

He must have fallen asleep eventually, because he wakes up on the floor with the dog curled up against his side. Light reaches in from the windows near the ceiling, painting stripes across her now-dry coat. It's a bit dirty and matted from the rain, but otherwise healthy, and though she's definitely lean she doesn't seem too malnourished. There are small patches of white amidst the black, on her chest and front paws and the impressive fluff of her tail. He doesn't know much about breeds, but she's probably a mix – she has a bit of the arctic dog look that was so common in Russia to her, but most strongly resembles the German Shepherds that were so common back on the Army bases during the war.

He blinks. Well. That hadn't even felt like a memory - it was just knowledge, readily retrievable without any effort. He squeezes his eyes shut and thinks, chasing that bit of knowledge, but there's nothing else. Nothing about the war, about Steve Rogers – just the easy, familiar surety that there were lots of dogs like this one around when he was in the US Army.

The dog in question stretches out and opens her eyes, looking up at him. She doesn't have a collar, tags, or anything to identify her as someone's pet. He pats her gently with his real hand while she sniffs at the metal one, though he can't tell if she reaches any kind of verdict about it.

“Hey, girl.” He says quietly, and his voice is raw and grates in his throat. He swallows. “You need something to eat?”

She looks up at him with her pink tongue hanging out of her mouth, panting. He grimaces when he realizes that he doesn't have anything to give her – he barely needs to eat, himself, and has been surviving off of rats for days since the fall.

He'd stumbled upon the abandoned building he's currently holing up in after dragging Steve Rogers to shore. It's along the riverbank, not far from where they fell, and it had given him a place to stay nearby while he'd healed, watching and waiting, all day, until finally by nightfall the man was found and brought to safety. The building suits his needs – it's secluded, there's fresh water available nearby, and it's a good place to lie low until he can regroup and decide what his next step will be.

But the concept of being able to decide, of having a choice, is too new to him. Without a mission, he hardly has any idea how to proceed. He'd ventured from his hideaway once, in the early hours of the morning after Steve Rogers was found, once his body felt well enough to move. He'd located the extraction point he would have been picked up at, if things had gone differently... if he had completed his mission, and returned to his handlers. If Steve Rogers' words had not broken through.

He'd gone stealthily, casing the area – a park, empty in the early dawn - before arriving, but there were no operatives around. That in itself was suspicious – he'd missed the agreed-upon rendezvous ( _“You have seven hours. I want a confirmed kill”_ a voice echoed in his head). It was his first hint that something was different. 

He'd retrieved the bag stashed where he expected, wedged under the struts of a park bench. Inside had been civilian clothes, cash, and a communicator. Typical protocol – a contingency, in case he missed the rendezvous. It had happened before, and each time there had been furious messages on the communicator, awaiting his reporting back. This time, however, there had been nothing. He'd stared at the device, not quite understanding – it seemed too good to be true. He'd come here with the intent of neutralizing any operative waiting to take him back, before disappearing from the grid. And here it looked like his handlers had forgotten him entirely. 

Still, it gave him a sort of grim pleasure to crush the communicator in the palm of his hand, with a satisfying crunch of metal on metal. 

He'd dressed quickly, and gone into the city, sliding seamlessly into the early morning bustle. They'd taught him how to blend in amongst any surroundings, including busy cities. He knew how to slouch to avoid drawing attention to himself, to walk unhurriedly, to tuck his metal hand into a pocket so no one would see it. He knew how to fit in amongst people, even if he'd always known that he wasn't one. 

Sliding a newspaper off a stand with no one noticing was as easy as breathing. The reports gave him a picture of what had happened. A flash of the hated face and a name to go with it – Alexander Pierce. Dead. SHIELD's secrets revealed; HYDRA scattered. Captain America's name cleared, recovering in a hospital. 

All good news, he'd been pretty sure. Too much of a jumble to figure out what it meant for him. Beyond the simple fact that for the moment, there was nobody after him. There was no mission. His time was his own. 

And there was a huge building with Captain America's picture on it – that seemed as good a place as any to start. It had turned out to be a museum, and there, confirming the words that the man had said to him, the words that had changed everything – he'd seen the man with his face. Bucky Barnes, Steve Rogers' best friend.

And now he has short hair to match that face, and a dog that needs food, and all he has to eat is rats. People don't eat rats, he reminds himself, scrubbing a hand over his face and groaning. The dog tilts her head quizzically, then licks at his hand. He gets up and walks over to the door, figuring he should take a piss before he tries to deal with anything, but the dog slips out around him and disappears into the trees before he has a chance to stop her.

Well, that's that. She'll be okay. She looked like she'd been doing fine on her own, he tells himself.

But something in him aches suddenly, sharply, at her departure. It had been nice to have her company, just for the night. It had been nice to not be alone.

~-~

He's lying along the riverbank later that day, his eyes squeezed shut and his mind purposefully blank, trying to let memories come to him, when a crack from the left has his eyes fly open and his hand on his knife in less than an instant.

But trotting out of the trees towards him is the dog, her tail wagging and a limp squirrel between her jaws. He laughs, and it isn't so strange this time. That light feeling in his chest is back. He pats her head, and she settles beside him, tearing into the squirrel. The sound of ripping flesh is all-too familiar, but doesn't trigger any specific memories. It's oddly peaceful, sitting along the river with the dog beside him.

She pads over to the water and laps at it when she's finished eating, and he hopes it's clean enough for her to do that. He's been drinking it, but he's pretty sure his body doesn't care what shit he puts into it. Or what he does to it at all, for that matter. When she flops back down beside him he stares for a moment. He doesn't use his voice enough for talking to be easy, even to a dog.

“So it seems like you're going to stick around, huh?” Her ears prick up and she looks at him steadily. “I guess I should call you something. I don't know what names people give dogs.” He thinks back to her dark outline the night before, to the way she blends into the trees. “How about Shadow?”

Her tail wags a bit and he decides to take that as approval. His mouth twists up in the easiest grin yet, and he scratches gently behind her ears. “Alright Shadow, I'm-” he pauses, not sure how to go on. “Bucky,” he decides. Then with a little more conviction, “My name is Bucky.” The words feel right in his mouth, and sitting there by the river with the dog at his side, something like peace settles in his chest.

 

**Author's Note:**

> More to come! Thanks for reading - concrit and comments are much, much appreciated.
> 
> You can find me [here](http://insignem.tumblr.com/) on tumblr!


End file.
